EDITOR’S CHOICE SELECTION

($100 SCHOLARSHIP PRIZE)

Nassau and Beyond

I’m with you in Princeton, Where you’re too much of a stranger to know me but I can tell you who is 18 and who is faking so that you don’t get any more questions, you writer of death poetry I chatter-upper of Hispanics on lunch break who think I’m among them and wanting to sex them I’m with them for a moment that is thicker than the times when I am with you. With you on Palmer’s Square, ripping away Math Prep, contact Will, Learn Italian from Sandra ‘12 I take them all down and it’s not all so great here, I say, maybe it’s your company. With you on Witherspoon where you are never hungry but the bread smells good and the yogurts all fresh you say taro root is the flavor of misunderstanding so I taste. I’m with you in Princeton, where you decide not to go Pre-Med and here in this one place that celebrates Einstein’s birthday there is a church on Nassau where once a loon burned down the balcony. Polo men are ugly like aliens coming out of This Side of Paradise there are few birds here, McCarter Theatre did you know is where Our Town began because these people are too smart for slowness so when they finally stop their halting feet get published. At Shop of the World I buy a golden Saraswati she costs me fifty dollars you say who the hell is she I say goddess of knowledge you laugh and go traipse inside an eating club, drink, and I am with myself in Princeton a golden stranger in my hands.

Bindu Bansinath, NJ, North Brunswick

“BEST OF ISSUE” NOMINEE

Woman in Art Nouveau

They’ll show her paint a-splatter, Pollock’s streaks of yellow-red-black

yellow like disease, red like blood, black like darkness

smother it in clear coats of angst, call it Fractal, Billion-Dollar Art